It was not long ago when my “worry of the month” was not a sales target but an impending internal/sessional exam. 9th May, 2014 – the day we graduated from DDU feels just like yesterday, when we bid a good-bye to the then existing coal-tar roads at DDU, the then-existing cricket ground and most importantly our friends and professors from DDU. While we left DDU, DDU didn’t leave us. There’s something about DDU, I feel, that makes it more of a spirit and less of a place, one that stays alive within you and keeps you charted even in the most uncertain times in life.
When I speak of DDU, it would be unfair to not mention its essence – Nadiad! It’s difficult to not hate this village, town, city at first for not having a life and then even more difficult not ending up falling in love with it at the end of four years. Nadiad of July, 2010 was a minimalistic village, town, city with countless Puff bakeries (Payal being our favorite with Punjab Bakery next in line) and only 3 restaurants in the entire village, town, city – Woodlands, Vaangi and Tulsi. There were no cafes back then, no CCD, Havmore, Dominos, Subway, and hence, the love stories then blossomed under the moonlight at the banks of canal – our only recreation spot back then in 2010. However, this entire experience of having everything just barely enough survive gave us the attitude of managing everything in the most minimal resources. Today, I traverse across several small villages of Punjab effortlessly, appreciating their simplicity and minimalism.
I entered DDU on 26th July, 2010 as an IT Engineering student who had to struggle hard with EG, stop cribbing about a sessional every month sooner than the other Amdavadis would, to make it to the CE Department in the branch change window in 3rd semester. Until, the first one and a half year, I was yet another DDUian whose biggest focus was just crossing the next sessional. However, destiny had something much larger in store for us, probably, it had written instituting DDU Connect in our name. We started conceiving DDU Connect somewhere in the fag end of our 3rd Semester, somewhere in late 2011 and by the time it was January, 2012 we had already lost our nights’ sleep to give birth to this newspaper while we still juggled with 3 sessionals, 1 viva, 1 external and countless (and pointless) plagiarized journal submissions each semester. But it was probably this experience of establishing DDU Connect while still managing to be a 7.(point)someone at DDU that transformed me into a MANAGER – of time, people and priorities – much before I entered a top-10 B-School of the country.
Yes, churning out a newspaper issue every month while building a team for sustaining its future was tougher than we had imagined! Yes, managing a team of 50+ along with the innumerable creative and organizational differences was much more challenging than we had anticipated! And yes, managing the former two with DDU-academics and looming MBA-entrance exams was certainly more frustrating! But it was this spirit called DDU that gave us the attitude of surviving “one more day” before the thought of giving up knocked our minds. It was this spirit called DDU that taught us how to break a daunting semester into three small sessionals, 1 small viva and 1 really little final exam. It was this spirit of DDU that taught us that life is a marathon that is composed of several short sprints, as you just keep on acing the sprint ahead, you automatically are winning the marathon! Today, as a Sales Manager, the monthly targets don’t haunt me any more; they’re just other numbers like those sessionals that keep on every month.
Note: This blog post was published as an article in DDU Connect‘s Volume 6 Issue No. 3
